Comment by Barrin92
19 hours ago
One thing that seems underdiscussed to me is that oral culture compared to literary culture seems to have a strong impact on dissemination of hate or mass messaging. My pet theory is that the resurgence of the medium, that so much content is now again visual and audio dominated compared to textual, is responsible for a good amount of the increase in hate in recent years.
There's a one-to-many and sort of fuzzy, conspiratorial and hearsay nature to radio, podcasting, preaching, that you don't have in a literary context. It's the ease of transmission and ephemerality of it that enables so much uncritical engagement.
That's an interesting theory, but isn't it a different set of people consuming the audiovisual material? So, roughly speaking, in the past, an educated minority read The Times, while most of the population took no interest in politics and foreign affairs. Nowadays public opinion matters so various powers (often foreign powers not controlled by the local establishment) generate material designed to influence the general population, which isn't exactly literate, as you'll know if you've ever had to do jury service. Meanwhile, the educated minority continues to read The Economist or whatever (The Times is rubbish nowadays).
> while most of the population took no interest in politics and foreign affairs
Perhaps not foreign affairs so much, but I'd argue in the past politics was keenly important to a large percentage of the population in the past. Particularly local politics.
The reason for that was simple, politics was a form of entertainment and local politics was both fun to talk and gossip about, more so than national politics.
What I believe has changed is the internet and broadcasting in general has changed what's entertaining. People care less about the issues and more about the presenter. National broadcasting selected for the most entertaining presenters which have the opportunity to bend political opinions to their own. The internet has opened up access to presenters which has done the same thing as national broadcasting but allows for even more extreme positions. Interest in local politics died for pretty much the same reason why local theater is dead. It's simply not as entertaining as a large budget production (generally). Sure, someone could probably make local politics interesting, but that's inherently going to have a smaller audience draw. That's why national politics is easier to talk about.
One other thing that's changed, though, is the options for presenters is now humongous. It's simply unlikely that you or your coworkers will have similar enough media diets to discuss at the water cooler. That's made everything a lot more private and isolated.
Marshall McLuhan thought that Adolf Hitler played really well on the radio but would not have played well on television, people would have seen his face turn red.
It's hard to tease apart the differences between modalities. On Youtube today there are many "videos" that are good to play in the background, be it Technology Connections, Pod Save America, or Asmongold's show. Part of the experience of reading is that an individual can find things that are rare, obscure, that it doesn't have to be massy at all [1] -- in the past economics required television and radio to be massy but podcasts, in principle, are really cheap and could service obscure tastes. Another fraction is that reading itself is a filter: even in the core a lot of people like Asmongold are functionally illiterate, in a place like Rwanda you just can't reach most people through writing.
[1] read https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med..., read https://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Population-America-Learn-E...
One thing about the radio is that it can be on while you're doing other things, if those things don't require much concentration.
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